Lectures
Renaud Haerlingen
ROTOR: Messages from the Field
Renaud Haerlingen, architect, is a member of Rotor and co-founder of Rotor Deconstruction. He is currently tutoring an Architectural Design Studio at the Royal College of Art in London and he is collaborating with the Master of Interior Architecture at the HEAD in Geneva. In recent years he led multiple academic workshops and he was visiting professor of the Master in Social Design at Die Angewandte in Vienna. Prior to his involvement at Rotor Renaud worked on the design development of projects in the Middle East and as a member of the Brussels collective Boups he organized free-parties and designed public happenings.
Founded in 2005, Rotor is a group of architects, designers and other professionals interested in material flows in relation to resources, waste, use and reuse. Rotor disseminates creative strategies for salvage and waste reduction through workshops, publications, and exhibitions. They represented Belgium at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennial in 2010. Their exhibition, Usus Usures explored wear as a reaction to use in architecture and as potentially creative process. In 2011, they curated and designed the OMA/Progress show in the Barbican Art Gallery in London, an overview of the work of Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, while in 2013 they curated the Oslo Architecture Triennale, including a vast exhibition on the challenges facing ’sustainable’ architecture today, Behind the Green Door. In 2018, for the Manifesta Art Biennale in Palermo they carried out an environmental intervention, Da quassù è tutta un’altra cosa. Rotor’s approach consistently—and very often visually—emphasizes the effects of human planning, oversight, and extended use on the built environment. In parallel with these exhibition projects, Rotor continued to realize various design projects, often interventions in existing architecture. This work has its equivalent in a growing series of deconstruction projects in which Rotor oversees the dismantlement of building components, in buildings slated for demolition, for reuse purposes. These dismantling and reselling activities are conducted under the heading of Rotor Deconstruction, a separate, spin-off entity created in 2014.
